Hey if Sonos can just up and screw their UI then I can just up and decide to never use them for future speakers. Time to check the resale value of this garbage in case they can't fix the UI accessibility like yesterday.
@talon actually curious, do we have a convenient alternative? Tried Google Home Maxes and the CHromecast protocol seems to be pretty prone to stutters/dropouts. Sonos does this better, but not familiar with other solutions and their accessibility, pretty much refuse to even consider HomePod or whatever the newest iteration of that is called these days
@zersiax Not sure. I also refuse to use Google because it's... you know... Google. You'll buy the thing and by the time you get home and unbox it it's discontinued.
@talon I’m somewhat sad that I only just bought a new speaker. I added another error 300 to my lounge room Setup to make a stereo pair. And they sound amazing! I suppose one of the advantages to the way I do things most of the time is that I don’t need the app for the most part. so hopefully I won’t have to worry about that until they fix things, but if I don’t see some fixes in the next few weeks? That might be different.
@SerenaTori yeah very unfortunate. I've had these for a very long time. And the app was definitely a lot better when I got it compared to even what it was before the update now.
@talon Thing is, for anything beyond single speaker over Bluetooth, you need the proprietary software. Amazon, Apple, or Google could do the same shit, at any time. If you're migrating, I'd suggest Apple or Google. Apple has AirPlay, and Google has Chromecast, but your phones or computers can't send any media to more than one Amazon speaker at a time.
@talon Yeah I would probably be selling my Sonos shit if I had any. They claim they are going to put in some fixes by the 21st so maybe it's worth hanging around for a couple of weeks, but I am overall very disappointed with how they handled this. They could have just not released the app update until it was ready for everyone. Is it too much to hope that some big company will do that someday? Probably.
@sapphireangel@talon I've never bought into the hype of Sonos. if i'm going to build a nice sound system i'm going to do it the old fashioned way with an amp and wires. Then i'll plug smart devices into that. Then the paperweight will be a cheap smart thing, not my whole speaker system.
@simon@talon I honestly don't get the big fix on speakers. I get it the quality is good, but honestly I'm not an audio junky so my phone is just fine to me.
@sapphireangel@talon I also usually listen with headphones, unless someone else is visiting me, so I'm generally fine. It is sometimes nice to have music in the background while I do other things on the phone though.
@sapphireangel@simon@talon I used to have a bunch of them. The fun is linking them all together, then placing them around the house. Music comes from everywhere. Being able to talk to the speaker when in the shower is handy, too.
@sapphireangel@simon@talon Depends on how much you like music in the shower. I love it! I have this dream, maybe in the new house, of installing stereo speakers in the shower walls, and putting a sub in the corner of the bathroom.
@simon@talon Yeah, I’m going to hold off for a few weeks, possibly even a month or two, but I am really regretting the fact that I only just bought a new speaker for my lounge room set up. LOL.
@simon I don't want to be overly pessimistic, but there is some suggestion that they may be using a cross-platform UI toolkit like React Native. That makes accessibility many times harder if true, and requires a level of dedication Sonos haven't shown thus far.
I'm not hugely affected, given that I do most things via AirPlay and voice. The resale market for Sonos equipment in my area is also non-existent, so I don't have much choice but to hold onto my stuff. Nevertheless, I'm not hopeful. @talon
@jscholes@simon@talon I've been thinking about grabbing the Android app to find out if they're using React Native, Flutter, or something else. I guess there's no easy way to peek inside third-party iOS apps these days.
@jscholes@simon@talon So there just isn't a single fucking way to have cross-platform UI accessibility besides build entirely different apps for each one?
@x0 It's possible. But it's hard work, and none of the options (including React Native) are going to give you perfect, native-feeling accessibility out of the box. There will always be something off, and it's just a question of how much it ends up mattering to the user. Teams that opt for these toolkits also tend to lose some of the guardrails that native UI provides. @simon@talon
@nick I'm not claiming it's impossible to create a positive outcome with certain cross-platform UI toolkits, only that it's a lot harder. When dealing with a mainstream company who wants to replace platform-specific expertise with interchangeable genericness, that is a problem... for us.
@nick#Sonos has replaced its app not because they truly think the app is better. But because they can replace specialised Android, iOS, Windows, and macOS teams with one generic team who know how to use cross-platform tools.
It goes beyond that, though. Look at the ideas behind the new home screen, which essentially can be described as: "put what you want on it". Is that primarily a user-facing improvement? No.
Rather, it's a reason to not rely on designers who can carefully think through information architecture, viewport sizes, user flows, and the best ways to present information. Make it the user's problem so that they can fire the people whose responsibility it used to be, or move them to another team where they won't be able to do their best work and will eventually quit and not be replaced.
This update goes way beyond #accessibility. It's a fundamental shift in how they do business, and it will be shit for everyone. That, more than the lack of #VoiceOver support, is what will probably cause me to move away from their ecosystem.
@nick@jscholes@x0@talon I wouldn't say it's awesome. Even on mobile, the tab labels and selection states have been added as part of the text label. That tells me that either it's difficult to add selected states to controls, or the developer didn't take the time to learn how. On the web, it is a mess of nested dialogs and weird conventions that don't really function all that well with a keyboard or screen reader. Even the home screen of the app is a dialog. Many of them don't automatically take keyboard focus, or if they do, it's not consistent. In short, it's a hack on both platforms, and it shows.
@talon@simon@jscholes Accessible UI is hard. Cross platform is hard. You can combine the two - but that is exponentially harder. Of course doing an app for each platform is also hard, and making each accessible is exponentially hard as well (but it is easier to punt on some "lesser" platform)
@jscholes@simon@talon I finally looked at the Android app. (I'm not a Sonos user, but I'm curious about this whole disaster.) It's Flutter, which is the other major cross-platform mobile UI toolkit. That puts the app at a further disadvantage, because Flutter renders its own widgets and has to implement its own accessibility for those widgets, rather than wrapping native ones.
@matt@simon@talon Wonderful. The only experience I have with Flutter came when a prominent accessibility figure was touting how much progress had been made with it. I downloaded the example app they were talking about, and found it to be one of the clunkiest things I'd ever used on my phone.
@jscholes@matt@talon The best example I've ever seen of what I know to be a Flutter app is Aira. The entire app is contained in a dialog which doesn't focus by default. Lots of other sections of the app are nested dialogs that also don't focus. keyboard access is clunky at best.
Normally, when you load a Flutter app in a browser, it comes up with an "Enable Accessibility" button. Aira seems to do this automatically, but I've seen the button get focused briefly before accessibility mode triggers.
The worst example I've seen is a phone provider in the Philippines. With accessibility mode turned off, I can't read a single thing in the interface. With it turned on, the only way to focus text fields and other controls is to tab to them. The mouse won't focus them, NVDA can't focus them. So I had to get visual assistance with accessibility mode turned off, relying 1000% on the agent.
I don't know how much of that is PLDT's fault, but I don't really care. No framework should allow for the creation of such an abysmal experience, and having to press a special accessibility button is bad news, as I hope we can all agree.
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